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The January 2013 post

I realized it would be dishonest to call these “monthly outlook” posts because, well, I don’t ever really do anything that I say I will. Thus is the Makigumo experience. But now we have a whole new year so I thought I’d start the January 2013 post by looking at 2012… and some web stats!

Fun with web stats: 2012 edition

WordPress’s Jetpack plugin gives me easy access to site stats, although they don’t match up with what I see in cPanel. Both stat aggregators do agree on a sharp drop-off in May (when I switched to WordPress), however. This is because I eliminated the old site completely, so a lot of the links from Google and other random websites were broken.

From 2007 (when I first bought the web hosting) to 2011, I had gotten regular growth in yearly visits. It hit a high mark in 2011 with 76,000+ unique visitors according to Awstats. 2012 and the switch to WordPress caused a dramatic decrease, dropping to under 53,000 unique visitors. Most of these visitors seem to come from Google image search, so I don’t really know the impact to my actual readership.

I get the most views from the US, naturally, but what countries are in the top five? I wouldn’t have guessed they would be Mexico, Finland, Canada, and Brazil in that order. Japan comes in at number six, just a handful of views behind Brazil.

My biggest referrer is Google image search, which is unsurprising because I have many images. But my #2 referrer all-time is Tentacle Armada. It seems that spot on Tier’s blogroll has driven quite a few visitors here! Gotta give Tier a shout-out in any case, he does great things.

Going down the rabbit hole of referrers, though, things get a bit weird. Makigumo seems to be an authority on pink-haired anime girls because this is apparently the only website out there with Elfen Lied content.

I’ve also gotten linked to on Wikipedia’s discussion page for Akira, where they say my Akira review is “a weak article” and that I’m “a weaker reviewer.” To be fair, I’ve never claimed to know what I’m doing.

It seems like I’m known by at least a handful on the Evageeks forum, which is cool because I love that site.

Search terms are always fun to look at to get an idea of what people expect from this site. “Sword of miracles” and “Emma Frost” beat out everything else for some reason. Other terms I’ve spotted: “underboob slip”, “breast physics”, “glossy butts” (very fitting actually), “araragi naked“, and several variants containing “thongs” and “ass”. So mission accomplished, I guess.

Since it is the new year, I’ll do my 2012 in review thing like a true Bulls fan on Real GM. The good: video games, Persona 4 fandom, The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, mechanical keyboards. The bad: the Bulls’ offseason, kind of a shitty year for figures, school shootings, hurricanes. The Bogans: the Apocalypse.